Please read the background essay and after you finish the background essay, answer the questions.
Background Essay:
Although some level of immigration has been continuous throughout American history, there have been two prominent periods: the 1880 to 1924 Age of Mass Migration, primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe. During some of the peak years of immigration in the early 1900s, about one million immigrants arrived annually, which was more than one percent of the total U.S. population at the time. In the early 21st century, there have been a few years with more than one million legal immigrants, but with a total U.S. population of almost 300 million, the relative impact is much less than it was in the early years of the 20th century.
The first impact of immigration is demographics. The 70 million immigrants who have arrived since the founding of the republic (formal records have only been kept since 1820) are responsible for the majority of the contemporary American population (Gibson 1992: 165). Most Americans have acquired a sense of historical continuity from America’s founding, but this is primarily the result of socialization and education, not descent. The one segment of the American population with the longest record of historical settlement is African Americans. Almost all African Americans are the descendants of 17th- or 18th-century arrivals (Edmonston and Passell 1994: 61).
Much of the historical debate over the consequences of immigration has focused on immigrant “origins”—where they came from. Early in the 20th century when immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe was at its peak, many old-stock Americans sought to preserve the traditional image of the country as primarily composed of descendants from Northwest Europe, especially of English Protestant stock (Baltzell 1964). The immigration restrictions of the 1920s were calibrated to preserve the historic “national origins” of the American population (Higham 1988).
The hostility of old-line Americans to “foreigners” accelerated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as racial ideology and anti-Semitism also became part of American consciousness. The rising tide of nativism—the fear of foreigners—had deep roots in anti-Catholicism and a fear of foreign radicals. The new dominant element of this ideology in the late 19th century was the belief in the inherent superiority of the Anglo-Saxon “race” (Higham 1988: Chapter 1).
Cities, where most immigrants settled, were derided and feared as places filled with dangerous people and radical ideas (Hawley 1972: 521). These sentiments were often formulated by intellectuals, but they resonated with many white Americans who were reared in rather parochial and homogenous rural and small-town environments. While some reformers, such as Jane Addams, went to work to alleviate the many problems of urban slums, others such as Henry Adams, the descendant of two American presidents and a noted man of letters, expressed virulent nativism and anti-Semitism (Baltzell 1964: 111).
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first step toward a closed society. From the 1880s to the 1920s, a diverse set of groups, ranging from the old-line New England elites to the Progressive Movement in the Midwest and to the Ku Klux Klan led a campaign to halt immigration from undesirable immigrants from Europe (Higham 1988; Jones 1992: Chapter 9). In the early decades of the 20th century, the nascent pseudo-science of Eugenics was used to support claims of the inferiority of the new immigrants relative to old-stock Americans.
What regions did most immigrants migrate from 1880-1924?
*
United States
Southern and Eastern Europe